The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (7 page)

He might not have had so much faith had he known they were to be stacked up against beings that had apparently stepped straight into 1940 from the year 4000-and-odd, B.C.

As the plane was leaving New York’s sharp skyline, The Avenger stepped into the Braintree Museum. An anthropologist on the staff had just discovered the dead body of Bill Casey and phoned the police, who hastily got in touch with the man with the flaming eyes in the death-mask face.

Benson bent over the corpse.

There were two wounds on the body, and these two, either one of them instantly fatal, told him all he wanted to know about the murder.

One was a small slit in the back where a knife had gone straight to the ex-cop’s heart. There was practically no blood at all around this. The slim gash had closed when the knife was withdrawn, and the bleeding had been nearly all internal.

The other was as bloody as a slaughterhouse. That was the straight slash across the throat that had half-decapitated the corpse. A clotting lake of crimson was on the floor from this.

A police captain worried over the two deadly wounds.

“What’s the meaning of ’em?” he fretted. “The stab in the heart killed him deader’n a salt mackerel. And that, I think, came first. Why did the killer slash his throat, too? And why kill Casey anyhow? There’s nothing gone from the museum, as far as a fast check shows. It’s goofy.”

Smitty’s eyes sought the colorless, flaring orbs of his chief. And Benson nodded.

He knew the reason; and Smitty had guessed it too.

The Ring of Power! Needing renewal every forty-eight hours in life blood! Casey’s heart stab hadn’t been bloody. So the hand that wielded the knife slashed the throat to remedy that lack, then dipped the ring.

“The guy that wore that ring last was Taros—or his double,” the giant Smitty whispered. “And Farnum Shaw is a dead ringer. Do we pick him up, chief?”

Benson shook his head. “Not yet. It sounds simple, Smitty. But there is something behind all this so sinister and complicated that I still can hardly guess at it. Enough to say that the removal of Shaw would do no good at all.”

The captain of police was worried about another point, too.

“I don’t see how anybody could get in here. The joint is built like a bank. There are thick bars over all windows, and none of the bars show signs of having been tampered with. The doors are bronze, solid, thick. They’ve got locks on ’em like a time vault. And the locks look all right, too. You’d think the killer was a ghost that could go through the doors or walls.”

Benson left the sprawling stone barracks of the museum, with its long-dead occupants and their accessories.

At the home he was temporarily using, he told the giant Smitty to go on to the airport and pick up Mac and Josh and Rosabel and Nellie.

He went into the mansion alone.

His manufacturer friend had left a skeleton staff of servants to take care of the empty house, among them the butler. The butler was good. Usually he was at hand to open the door before Benson could even get his key into the lock.

He was not at hand, now. Benson let himself in, his cold, pale eyes as expressionless as ice. There was no one in the front hall.

That is, there was no one until he got almost to the curving marble staircase. Then there were suddenly three figures in the hall beside his own.

Three figures as bizarre in the morning light as things out of a madman’s nightmare. Three things garbed in the robes of priests of old Egypt, and with naked blades in their upraised hands. Three things whose eyes were dully mad, and whose lips writhed with a lust to kill.

Without sound or word they rushed on The Avenger.

Benson had two of the world’s strangest weapons sheathed in slim holsters at the calves of his legs. One, below the left knee, was a needle-like throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle which he called Ike. The other, below the right knee, where a search for weapons seldom extends, was a specially designed .22 revolver. It was so streamlined that it looked like a length of blued pipe, with a slight bend for a butt. For compactness, the tiny cylinder held only four cartridges. There was a silencer on the small muzzle. This weapon Benson called, with grim affection, Mike.

With the appearance of the three, Benson’s hands flashed for Mike and Ike. Not that he didn’t think he could handle three ancient knife-wielders with bare hands, but he wanted to be sure to capture one of them. And he could do that because of the uncanny accuracy with which he could handle Mike.

The Avenger did not kill. He used Mike to “crease” attackers with. He shot so that the vicious small slugs hit the top of a skull and glanced, knocking the victim cold, without killing him.

He wanted to perform this marvelous, eighth-of-an-inch shot now. But in stooping for Mike, for once in his life he made a mistake of timing.

The three were rushing him just a little faster than he realized.

He had his hand on the slight bend which was Mike’s grip, and was flashing the deadly, silenced pigmy from its holster, when the nearest of the three silent figures got to him.

The knife in that one’s hand flashed down.

Benson had to straighten and raise his arm in defense, to block the flashing death by letting the wrist behind the knife smack down on his upthrust fist. The maneuver was a success. But the knife glanced against the silenced little .22 with a clang, and Mike was torn from his fingers.

The other two were on him, now! A knife thudded home against his left side. Another thumped against his back, directly over the heart.

Benson sagged to his knees!

The blades, gleaming a curious golden color in the early light, ripped into him in a score of places. But, oddly, they didn’t go in far, and when they were withdrawn there was no blood on their blades. That, although few but his aides knew it, was because Benson constantly wore a sort of vest of celluglass, a plastic of his own invention that was stronger than spun steel.

The leader of the three—a tall, emaciated figure with an eagle beak of a nose, a hairless skull, and mad eyes under hairless brows—brought the handle of his heavy knife like a blackjack down on Benson’s head.

Then the knives began reaching for his throat!

The Avenger was half-stunned. But even in that condition he was faster than most men. He got a wrist in his left hand, and wrenched.

When he wrenched, there was a soundless writhe of agony of the body under the priest’s robe. The knife was dropped. The straining wrist managed to jerk free at last, because Benson still was half-dazed. But the owner of the wrist made no effort to charge again; simply doubled over the strained limb and moaned.

Benson got the second of the three with a blow to the heart that seemed literally to leave the robed figure hanging from his fist for a few seconds.

The leader, gaunt and eagle-beaked and vulture-like, glared at Benson for an instant, then raced for the door. It was defeat. Benson’s strength was plainly returning from the blow on the head; and if he couldn’t be vanquished, now that he was weaker than normal, how could he be successfully attacked when he had regained his normal power?

The other two staggered after him. And Benson leaped for the three of them. As far as
he
was concerned, the battle wasn’t over!

The emaciated leader, who looked so fantastically like the long-dead Taros, tipped a great oak chair in front of Benson.

The Avenger could have side-stepped that easily, had he been in full possession of his senses. As it was, he couldn’t quite miss it, and he went down.

The three slipped out the door. Benson got to the curb—and saw nothing.

Nothing at all was in evidence on the sidewalk of the broad avenue; nor was there any sign of the three when he went past the side of the mansion to the rear.

The three in priests’ robes had stepped out the door—and vanished.

Benson went back, pale eyes flaming like ice under an arctic sun. He found the butler.

The man was bound hand and foot with strange bonds. They were linen, so old as to be dark brown, but still as strong as rope.

Also, The Avenger picked up the knife that one had dropped.

The knife, almost as heavy as a butcher-knife, had a solid metal handle. And the blade of the massive dagger was copper!

Benson took the knife to the front door. There was an iron grille over plate glass there. He drew the copper blade heavily over one of the iron bars.

A groove appeared in the iron, and the copper of the blade was dulled only a little. He bent the blade in his steel-strong fingers. It doubled, then snapped back straight again when the pressure was released.

The knife blade might be of copper but it was as hard and tough as tempered steel. Copper tempered till it was a match for steel! No one knows how to temper copper like that, now. Only one race has ever possessed the secret.

That was the ancient Egyptians!

The loss of the Taros amulets was still a secret. The police, papers and public hadn’t the faintest idea the priceless relics were gone.

Caine didn’t want even the museum directors to know—in fact, above all,
they
must not know. So that when Benson went to see the three that night, he was put to it to ask any questions and still not give the loss away.

He did it by feigning anxiety that the relics might be stolen in the near future—instead of having already been taken.

“Mr. Caine has decided to keep the amulets and the ring in his home for a few days,” he said evenly to Evans, first of the three directors he called on. “It is understandable. Enthusiastic as he is about such things, he probably studies them by the hour—gets a positive intoxication from their temporary possession. Yet it may not be a very wise thing to do.”

Short, fat Evans shrugged his shoulders.

“Gunther’s a privileged person,” he said. “If he wants to do that, I guess it’s all right. Irregular, but O.K.”

“He’s entirely responsible?” said Benson.

Evans laughed.

“Gunther Caine has between two and three million dollars, all in government bonds. He’s curator of Braintree because he loves the work, not because he needs it. I’ll say he’s a responsible citizen!”

“His servants?”

“They’ll never get near the amulets. Gunther’s no fool.”

“His son,” observed Benson, “is not quite the sort of boy you’d expect from such a father.”

“Why, how do you mean?” said Evans.

“For one thing, his father’s work evidently leaves him cold. As I remember, he was so bored with the talk of the Taros relics that he left the library in the middle of the discussion last night.”

“He did go out, didn’t he?” murmured Evans, in discreet evasion.

Benson kept it up. The little fat man was not to be drawn out about Harold Caine.

Spencer, tall and chubby, wasn’t so evasive. His kewpie-doll face became as severe as it could when Benson mentioned Harold Caine.

“He’s a hairbrained kid,” he said primly. “Wild as they come. Always overdrawn on the generous allowance his father gives him. A great worry to Gunther. But he’s fundamentally all right, Mr. Benson,” he added quickly.

“You say you are worried about the safety of the relics. You can dismiss
him
from your mind as a possible source of trouble.”